A Daughter of the Snows eBook

Not that Vance Corliss was anybody’s fool, nor
that his had been an anchorite’s existence;
but that his upbringing, rather, had given his life
a certain puritanical bent. Awakening intelligence
and broader knowledge had weakened the early influence
of an austere mother, but had not wholly eradicated
it. It was there, deep down, very shadowy, but
still a part of him. He could not get away from
it. It distorted, ever so slightly, his concepts
of things. It gave a squint to his perceptions,
and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned,
determined his classifications. He prided himself
on his largeness when he granted that there were three
kinds of women. His mother had only admitted
two. But he had outgrown her. It was incontestable
that there were three kinds,—­the good,
the bad, and the partly good and partly bad.
That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly.
In its very nature such a condition could not be
permanent. It was the intermediary stage, marking
the passage from high to low, from best to worst.

All of which might have been true, even as he saw
it; but with definitions for premises, conclusions
cannot fail to be dogmatic. What was good and
bad? There it was. That was where his mother
whispered with dead lips to him. Nor alone his
mother, but divers conventional generations, even
back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from
the soil and looked down. For Vance Corliss was
many times removed from the red earth, and, though
he did not know it, there was a clamor within him
for a return lest he perish.

Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited
definitions. He refused to classify her at all.
He did not dare. He preferred to pass judgment
later, when he had gathered more data. And there
was the allurement, the gathering of the data; the
great critical point where purity reaches dreamy hands
towards pitch and refuses to call it pitch—­till
defiled. No; Vance Corliss was not a cad.
And since purity is merely a relative term, he was
not pure. That there was no pitch under his
nails was not because he had manicured diligently,
but because it had not been his luck to run across
any pitch. He was not good because he chose
to be, because evil was repellant; but because he
had not had opportunity to become evil. But from
this, on the other hand, it is not to be argued that
he would have gone bad had he had a chance.

He was a product of the sheltered life. All
his days had been lived in a sanitary dwelling; the
plumbing was excellent. The air he had breathed
had been mostly ozone artificially manufactured.
He had been sun-bathed in balmy weather, and brought
in out of the wet when it rained. And when he
reached the age of choice he had been too fully occupied
to deviate from the straight path, along which his
mother had taught him to creep and toddle, and along
which he now proceeded to walk upright, without thought
of what lay on either side.